From those to whom much has been given, from them much shall be expected.
-- Luke

Saturday, January 19, 2013

Multiple occupancy

I made a crack recently about how the Japanese will solve their overcommitted entitlements problem, given their increasingly top-heavy dependency ratio, and given that 95 percent of their sovereign debt is held domestically, namely, that they will solve it by the old Boomers hunkering down and taking whatever the kids toss to them, just to keep the kids on the islands.

Now, American sovereign debt is significantly held by foreigners, so the prescription applies doubly to American Boomers. Almost a third of the young adult kids are already at home, since the Boomers already blew the national wad and let the political system get sold to the highest bidder, the multi-nationals and the corporate gangstas who sit atop that pile, who promptly shipped the jobs overseas and in the name of free markets screwed everyone who wasn't a member of their club, i.e., labor, anyone working for a wage or salary who wasn't participating in the ridiculously rigged stock market as a major part of their comp, and established oligopolies in as many industries as possible, and Wall Street decided to get into the action by pulling a magnificent bait and switch on the American homeowner, a classic pump and dump, so that their friends the hedgies could become the landlords of America... yada yada yada, you know the story by now.

The point being that multiple occupancy, whether in the extended family way or otherwise, is probably the future of real estate in America, especially for the Boomers.